New national Amber Alert system surprises cell phone owners with shrieking text messages

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The next time a child is abducted near you, your cell phone may shriek to life with an alert message.

A new national Amber Alert system officially rolled out earlier this month to millions of cell phones, and because the alerts are automatically active on most newer phones, the messages have already taken tens of thousands of people by surprise.

The newly-expanded emergency alert system is an effort by FEMA to update the way it reaches people with new technologies, but local officials and others worry that the lack of public education and some initial stumbles may undermine the program's purpose, especially when people are startled and annoyed and choose to opt out.

Lisa Rott was jolted from her sleep at 1:44 a.m. earlier this month in her Sarasota, Fla. home. A high-pitched tone sounded in spurts for about 10 seconds while her phone buzzed multiple times.

5. Dumb ass planning on this idea, for sure.

"Hey, I have a great idea! So let's implement it and THEN figure out what bugs it might have.
Millions of cell phone customers can be our guinea pigs, think of how much money we will save in testing!"

Jeez, the effort it took to have the cell phone companies make this operational could have been spent thinking it thru first. What the hell good does it do to wake up and annoy a million people on the chance that ONE of them will be
concerned about a missing kid in an undisclosed area?

12. I had the weather alert on my portable radio recently.

Normally I never listen to radio, and have no tv..the silence in the house is so marvelous.
But, a few weeks ago, we knew there was a bad storm coming in, so I turned on the local radio station for the
tornado warnings.
The station uses a direct feed from the weather service.
The feed consists of 4 blaring beeping LOUD sounds, then the report of possible tornado info.
Repeated every 5 minutes or so.
After about an hour of the LOUD blaring preamble, I had to turn the radio off. Too damn nerve wracking.
Went back to using the computer to track the tornadoes.
Can only imagine the heart pounding reaction to somethng like that going off on your cell phone in the dead of night.

14. What would be helpful is if

The alert didn't just disappear. I had no idea that amber alerts would set off iPhones until it happened to me & a friend at the same time. All we saw was something like a text, which then disappeared. But we couldn't find it again to read it more closely.